What do you want? What will you sacrifice to get it? 

What do you want to be good at? What will you sacrifice to get good? 

Now add in a partner and kids, and read it again. Is it what you're willing to sacrifice or what you are willing to let your loved ones sacrifice for you?

Working late, diving into personal projects, honing your skills is the easy part; you've been trying to run yourself into the ground for years. The sacrifice is happening when you're away. The extra time you don't have with your kids, a half-distracted mind when you're around, the extra juggling on your partner's shoulders in your absence. 

Newly a parent, work, and family life make up the waking hours of the day. How will you get better at your job, learn a new skill, keep the ones you have, or progress in any sort of meaningful way? 

Do you settle into the mediocrity of parenthood or find ways to chip away at your newfound un-exceptional output?

If you aren't the one who birthed your children, stop right now. Whatever dip into your personal, professional, bodily autonomy parenthood has caused you, it most likely pales compared to a mother. Be grateful and aware. 

But you are a person and have feelings too. They may not be as extreme as others, but they are real, and you will have to face them.

Is finding greater efficiency the key? Focusing your energy on maximizing whatever hours you have, structure your day down to the minute, set things up, and check them off with no overtime hours. Your boss might love it, and you'll feel productive as hell. But if you checked in with your sixteen your old self and asked, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" An expert in efficiency probably wasn't it.  

Maybe it's staying up late, waking up early. In a self-help book somewhere, this is the answer; there are always more hours you can get out of the day. Use the late nights and early mornings to focus on your work and personal growth. A good option, sure, but you'll have to ask your partner if they want a roommate to cross paths with or someone sharing a life.

When your kid is born, identity shifts, priorities get rearranged, and all the things you thought made you 'you' are scattered across the playroom floor to one day be slowly picked up and put back together in a new, hard-to-recognize order. Parenting is the longest game you'll ever play, and you won't know how you're doing for another 18-30 years down the road. It's hard to feel like your time is making any difference, but it's one of the most important things you have. The change is in where your time is aimed, how you look at it, and work to accept it. Being a good parent doesn't always mean excess financial and professional success; in a lot of instances, the inverse is true. The extra time in the office or on yourself is not sacrificed; it's shifted to your family, your kids, and working towards being a parent, a partner. The best place it can be. Soak it in.